This time I looked long and hard before leaping. A seminary degree was about the last thing that would have occurred to me. “David, I don’t even know good English,” I said.
“You’ll be fine. Moses made that kind of argument when God called him. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not good enough.’ And God always has the same response. If he wants you to do this, he will equip you for the task. Think of it this way: the next four to eight years of your life will equip you for the next forty years of ministry.”
David was an encourager. He always believed I could do things I doubted I could do. He was Paul to my Timothy.
In only our second meeting, David announced we were going to memorize Scripture.
“Okay,” I said. “I can probably handle that. Which verse?”
He laughed. “Verse? Verses. Passages. Whole chapters!”
“Wait—no,” I stammered. “You don’t understand, man. I can’t do that.”
I proceeded to give David a five-minute education on the effects of drugs and alcohol on the brain. “If you do all the drugs I did, for as long as I did, your mind is like a big basket with a hole in it. Stuff just leaks out the bottom. I can hold a little info, but not a load of it. No way I can memorize long sections of the Bible.”
David listened patiently as he ate his lunch. He allowed me to finish, then said, “That’s fine. We’ll just do four verses a week. You can handle four verses, right?”
“If you say so.”
I felt like a guy with a broken leg being told he could slam dunk, but I really wanted to go along with anything my new friend asked me to do. Not only that, but I loved the idea of whole passages of the Bible making their home inside my head. I just figured it wasn’t possible.
We started with Romans 1, the opening chapter of Paul’s masterwork on faith and salvation. For me, even memorizing a few verses was like trying to master advanced quantum physics—even in small pieces, it was daunting. I spent hours reading and rereading the verses. Then I’d write them down, repeating the phrases out loud. After that, I’d speak the words onto my Sony tape recorder, then lie back with my eyes closed and listen, playing the tapes over and over, trying to match my voice in reciting the phrases.
Little by little, I found I could recite the first chapter of Romans. And we kept right on going. We moved to Romans 2 and then Romans 8. We came to a verse about there being “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” I needed that one. This may have been the hardest work I’d ever done—but it was the most satisfying. I knew having those majestic words of the apostle in my head would renew an abused, ramshackle brain better than anything in the world.
All this time, I also had an abiding passion to share the gospel with my parents. Of course they were still churchgoing Catholics, and they were glad that at least my new obsession wasn’t likely to kill me, as the last one was. In other words, Jesus was a safer drug. They’d heard me speak to homeless people and to a tiny handful of bayou Presbyterians last Easter. They knew I was all in with my faith.
But that was the thing—I’d been all in with plenty of other pursuits. It could be magic or medication, jiujitsu or Jesus, one passion was the same as another. To my parents, it was just another age, another stage.
Not only that, but I wasn’t exactly tactful in the way I shared my faith with them. I confronted them on their Catholic teaching, weaponizing my theology. “Why do you think Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a co-Redemptrix with Christ?” I would ask. “Show me one verse in Scripture that backs up that claim.”
Or, “Jesus said to call no man Father, so why do you call your priest Father Bob?”
Or, “Where do you find Purgatory in the Bible? Let me read you a couple of verses that say Jesus gives us full access to salvation immediately after death.”
You can imagine how well the confrontation method went over. They would just sigh and try to change the subject, or they’d ask me to leave, if it came to that.
You can’t badger people into the kingdom of God.
But by Easter of 2004, maybe I was beginning to grow up just a little bit in my faith. I decided to stop the debates. They weren’t working. If anything, they were damaging our relationship. The Holy Spirit never seemed present when I was confrontational. So I decided to try something different.
My family was all together for Easter—Mom, Dad, my sister, my uncle, my aunt, and grandpa. I asked for everyone’s attention and, without explanation or introduction, I began to recite the opening to the Epistle to the Romans:
Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and singled out for God’s good news—which He promised long ago through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures . . . (hscb)
I don’t think anybody in the room understood what I was doing, or that what they were hearing was a straight Bible passage. I watched their eyes as I spoke from pure memory, and I saw a lot of knitted brows and lack of comprehension. As I went on, however, they began to realize where these majestic words came from.
But they’d never heard a passage of the Bible spoken this way. Ever.
I’d lived with those words for months and months; doted on them. I’d planted them in my mind, watered them, tended them, and watched over them to make sure they were taking root. I knew those words intimately, as I knew the features of my own face or the houses in my neighborhood.
The words of Paul’s letter to the Romans flowed out of my mouth easily,
